Featured Illustrator Sara Kendall

Sara Kendall is a freelance illustrator based in Ann Arbor, MI. She works mostly digitally and is always looking for middle grade projects featuring the weird, the ridiculous and the fantastical (bonus points for all three).

Sara has a BFA in Illustration from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, and enjoys reading speculative fiction, looking closely at bugs, and playing Jenga with the stack of unread books on her nightstand.

Hi Sara, we are excited to get to know you a little better. Are you from Michigan? Did you go to school for art? 

Hello Darren, and greetings to the Mitten readers! I was born and raised right here in Michigan. Specifically (but vaguely) I grew up in a rural bit in the Southeast of the state, where I could catch frogs in my family’s pond and try to make dragonflies land on my finger (it works more often than you’d think!)

My art education career has been a super long one. I went to college for art—twice in fact! I started out at U of M Flint with an aimless but determined desire to make representational art. A million thanks to my instructors, who taught me the basics and introduced me to the greats of illustration when I didn’t know what part of the art world I could fit in. 

With this new zest for art, I later transferred to the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, to study illustration specifically, and graduated with a BFA in 2017. 

I also did an extracurricular stint at the Illustration Academy in Kansas City, MO, in 2016, where I was able to learn from a lot of the same people I idolized when I first learned illustration was a viable career. 

Oh, and last and most, I was the recipient of a mentorship program through SCBWI. My mentor Kirbi Fagan helped me immensely in figuring out the direction I wanted to go, and the steps to take to get there. (From grade school to college, there are way too many dedicated and kind art teachers in my life to thank individually. I hope I was appreciative enough at the time, but regardless if you’re reading this please know that I’m forever grateful.)

Your art is highly stylized (and beautiful). What has inspired or helped shape your work?

Being an artist for me has been a long path of picking up what aspects of other artists’ work tickles my brain and discarding what I don’t enjoy. 

My Pinterest account can attest to me obsessing over a bajillion different artists over the years, but as far as whose influence I still see most clearly in my work, there are a few that stick out. As was true for most people my age, Mary Grandpre’s illustrations for Harry Potter, and Bret Helquist’s work for A Series of Unfortunate Events took up permanent residence inside my skull. Also, pretty much anything by Lane Smith always wowed me (his paintings also scared me, but hey sometimes kids like that!) In college, Mark English, Gary Kelly, and Charlie Harper steamrolled over my little gray cells and jump started my obsession with shapes and puzzle-like compositions. 

And, of course, my college art teachers played a huge role in helping me discard what wasn’t working and stick with what was.

Tell us about your process and tools. 

These days I work mostly on my iPad Pro in Procreate. I miss working traditionally, and I love my adjustable drafting table that I got for cheap on Craigslist, but you can’t beat digital for speed. 
For fancy Procreate brushes, I can recommend the Retro MaxPack by Max Ulichney, and the Vivi brushes by Vivien Mildenberger have some lovely textures. The brushes that come with the program work just as well, though. Generally, for most of the painting before I get to the details, I use the “Dry Ink” brush that comes with the program. I modified it to be bigger, so it doesn’t cramp my hand, but it’s a versatile tool at any size. Recently I tried out blocking in shapes on different layers using a digital airbrush. I don’t usually do this, but it was very satisfying and it might stay in my repertoire.

When it's time to draw, how do you prepare and set up your space? (Or are you more spontaneous?) Sometimes I have to trick myself into getting to work.

Oh tricking is the only way to get to work! I have a problem with perfectionism, and that can make me think myself into inaction, especially at the start of a project. The most foolproof way for me to get working is to have another task that I’m procrastinating on. Barring that, a reliable way for me to get my juices flowing and start ideating without overthinking it starts with sending a playlist to my bluetooth speaker, cranking it up and zoning out. Sometimes singing along is in the cards as well (I live alone, so I’m free to be super annoying about it.)

I do all early thumbnails and character designs on paper, because it’s easier for me to relax and be spontaneous when I’m not staring at a blank document. My sketchbook will never be one of those fancy ones you can display in galleries, but I like it that way. 

Once I have a few thumbnails, I take a photo of them with my phone (doesn’t need to be good) and import them to my iPad. I put them into a file on Procreate that’s the right aspect ratio for what I’m working on, but only at about 10% the size of the final so that I have access to more layers and I don’t get too stuck in the details, and I warp the original thumbnail  and draw on top until I like the result. Then, I start blocking shapes in black and white. When I have a design I like, I add color by putting adjustment layers over top, and then painting over them. When I like the sketch, I paste it into a document that’s the final size or larger, always at least 8 inches wide and 300 dpi. Then it’s just painting and dealing with an inner monologue alternating between “I’m a genius!” and “Wait, I forgot how to paint!” until I run out of time or ideas.

Where in your art can we find hints about who you are? Are there underlying themes you hope people pick up on?

It’s very important to me to avoid gendered stereotypes when designing characters, and I make a real effort to unlearn any that might creep into my drawing. When I was growing up in the 90’s, it always upset me when character design for cartoon animals had a “male design” which looked pretty much like the animal, and a “lady design” where the animators would add long eyelashes and an hourglass figure. There is a lot of this in human kids’ designs as well, where the girl characters will look like they’re wearing makeup as a baseline. No shade to people who draw kids that way, but it did always upset me that even when going on adventures and being the hero, girls were always expected to be pretty and put together, and boys weren’t ever allowed to be. Even the way they pose, in cover illustrations for middle grade fantasy books for example, are often gendered: boys are posed to emphasize power, with a wide stance, and girls are often drawn more gracefully, and in a way that flatters their angles. That’s not fair to any gender. When I design kids, I always do my best to imagine that gendered stereotypes don’t exist, because that’s what I wish I’d have more of when growing up.
 

Tell us something(s) about you that people might not know…

I like gardening and planting native wildflowers in my spare time, and I’ve plowed up a lot of my lawn to plant a native prairie from seed. (It takes several years for everything to come in, but this year the black-eyed susans and tickseed are really coming into their own, and it makes me happy to look at.) The eagle-eyed (or even bat-eyed, really) can probably tell I like monarchs from this month’s illustration, but what you might not know is that I love watching those chonky caterpillars chow down on milkweed, and later seeing if I can find their chrysalis.. The very hungry caterpillar was very effective propaganda, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Thanks Eric Carle!

Thanks for sharing with us, Sara! 

Be sure to check out sarakendall.net and instagram for more.